MojoWhatsup homebrew app bringing WhatsApp to webOS

There are plenty of messaging options out there, be it Facebook Chat or Google Talk or Apple's iMessage or plain old SMS. But when it comes to ubiquitous and popular cross-platform mobile chat, it's hard to beat WhatsApp. The only problem, at least for those of us on webOS Nation, is that WhatsApp never deemed it worth their time to build and release a webOS WhatsApp app. Thus, after years of waiting, webOS homebrew developer and webOS Nation Forum member amoralico decided to take matters into his own hands. The result: MojoWhatsup.

This unofficial unsanctioned third-party solution for webOS WhatsApp users is still a work-in-progress, but even at this stage it's shaping up to be a solid client. Released late last week, the MojoWhatsup 1.0 Alpha has already been downloaded more than 1300 times from GitHub. It supports SMS registration, individual and group chats (good luck with group chats with any other cross-platform mobile solution), notifications, emoji, sending and receiving media files, and the creation of contact groups.

There are some limitations to MojoWhatsup to be noted. Since the app is a hybrid app (Mojo front-end, PDK back-end), the support for background processes is not as clean as the developer would like, so there've been some hack-arounds to make notifications continue to work. Also, as it would require a Synergy Connector in addition to all of the work that's gone into it so far, MojoWhatsup doesn't support seeing your WhatsApp contact statuses. It's also worth noting that MojoWhatsup is using a reverse-engineered WhatsApp API, so if they wanted to, WhatsApp could kill MojoWhatsup just by changing their API. Though given the size of the webOS userbase and the fact that there's not now and not likely to be in the near future official WhatsApp solution for webOS, we wouldn't imagine they're going to be too angsty about it.

As we mentioned earlier, it's still an alpha and there's still work to be done. Thankfully, MojoWhatsup is being developer as an open source app, so you're free to download it and tinker around as you like. And submit improvements, if you're into that sort of thing. MojoWhatsup has been tested on a variety of devices, including the Veer, Pre 2, Pre3, and TouchPad, so unless you're running something ancient like an original Pre on webO 1.4.5 you should be able give MojoWhatsup a whirl.